Growing Together: A Look at this year's CMP Summer Workshops

Jun 28, 2016

June 20 marked the kick off of the 21st annual Getting to Know CMP Workshops and the newly created Digging Deeper into CMP Workshop. Both workshops focused on enhancing mathematics education structure for middle school students.

CMP is a problem-centered curriculum developed at MSU that promotes an inquiry-based teaching and learning classroom environment. Important mathematical ideas are identified and embedded in a sequenced set of problems that allow students to develop rich mathematical understandings and meaningful skills.

“The emphasis on thinking and reasoning, on making sense of ideas, and on developing sound mathematical habits provides opportunities for students to learn in ways that can change how they think of themselves as learners of mathematics,” explained Elizabeth Phillips, co-author of the curriculum. “Such a model promotes a different form of classroom interaction than has historically been used within mathematics instruction. Teaching mathematics through a sequence of connected problems in an inquiry-based classroom is a major shift for most teachers, as many did not learn mathematics in this way.”

Phillips and Glenda Lappan, MSU University Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, along with the late MSU mathematics professor William Fitzgerald, James Fey from the University of Maryland and Susan Friel from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, developed CMP with funding from the National Science Foundation. The curriculum is now used in all 50 states and several international schools. The third edition of the curriculum, called CMP3, was published in fall 2013.

This year’s summer workshops had participants from 20 states and three foreign countries.

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Get a sneak peek at the CMP and Concord Consortium Digital Inscriptions Project at the National Science Foundation STEM for All Video Showcase this week. The video shows teachers and students interacting with the CMP collaborative digital platform.

CMP Graduate Assistants participated in this event by creating posters based on research done with the curriculum. The purpose of the conference is to fuel discussions about efforts to improve K-16 teaching and learning STEM. It allows researchers and collaborators to share challenges and generate new ideas.

Elizabeth Phillips, AJ Edson, and Yvonne Slanger-Grant will be speaking at this year’s NCSM and NCTM Research Conferences in San Diego, California. These conferences focus on important issues for leaders in mathematics education and will be held April 1st to 3rd, 2019.